A RARE LATE MING BLUE AND WHITE OCTAFOIL DISH

Details

A RARE LATE MING BLUE AND WHITE OCTAFOIL DISH
ENCIRCLED LONGQING SIX-CHARACTER MARK AND OF THE PERIOD

The dish is painted in violet-blue tones at the centre with a monkey sitting on a rock beside two deer below a bird perched on a branch and three bees; the well is painted with lotus pods and flowers and other aquatic plants in a pond; the exterior is painted alternately with four auspicious emblems and four fruit sprays; the glaze has a soft blue tinge stopping at the foot and revealing the white body (minor glaze frits to rims)
4 7/8 in. (12.5 cm.) wide, box

Provenance

The Jarras Collection, Part II, sold in these Rooms, 8 October 1990, lot 305.

Literature

A. du Boulay, Christie's Pictorial History of Chinese Ceramics, p. 132, no. 5.

Exhibited

Christie's London, An Exhibition of Important Chinese Ceramics from the Robert Chang Collection, 2-14 June 1993, Catalogue, no. 20.

Lot Essay

Limited quantities of porcelain were produced during the short reign of the emperor Longqing. Another dish of this eight-petalled shape and design is recorded from the Morris S. Whitehouse collection, illustrated by Sir Harry Garner, Oriental Blue and White, London, 1975, p. 35, pl. 52A.

Compare also two further underglaze-blue Longqing-marked dishes of this shape both enamelled with ascending and descending dragons, the first is in the Baur Collection, illustrated by J. Ayers, Catalogue, vol. I, Geneva, 1999, no. A193; and the other dish, included in the exhibition, Chinese Porcelain: The S. C. Ko Tianminlou Collection, Hong Kong Museum of Art, 1987, is illustrated in the Catalogue, Part II, no. 73.

The visual image of the monkey, bees and deer provide the rebus jue lu feng hou which may be translated as 'may you be promoted to a Marquis'.

(US$20,000-23,000)

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